In recent years, scholarly and practical attention to service has expanded far beyond traditional confines to social welfare and public administration. As both an analytic enquiry and lived practice, the idea of service today challenges us to interrogate the underlying presumptions of our commitment to one another, whether as citizens, consumers, professionals, or creative practitioners. Service as a field of inquiry is fertile, not least because of global disruptions that have laid bare the manifold ways service sustains and fragments societies as a complex nexus of ethics, emotion, infrastructure, and power.
At its most fundamental level, service connotes helping or being present. To serve is to engage in selfless action, to sacrifice—or at least defer—one’s needs to those in need. As a humanitarian ideal, service expresses empathy, respect, and care. Yet service, beyond this primal ideal, is situated within broader complex social, political, and economic systems that nurture and confine it.
To unravel the complexity of service, it is helpful to distinguish between two interrelated dimensions: affect and effect. ‘Affect’ refers to the emotional, embodied presence that service providers bring to their work. Be it the empathetic gaze of a nurse, the listening ear of a teacher, or the committed labour of volunteers, these gestural utterances presuppose care and imprint themselves on both giver and receiver, generating human connectivity, providing a sense of security and safety. The affective dimension underscores service as an enactment of shared humanity, where personal vulnerability and professional discipline converge.
Yet service also possesses an ‘effect’: an instrumentalised role in governance and economic systems, inseparable from hard and soft infrastructures. Hard infrastructure comprises the tangible structures and facilities, such as schools, hospitals, and transport systems, that scaffold public service delivery. Soft infrastructure, conversely, encompasses the policies, norms, and bureaucratic procedures that determine and govern who benefits from the rendered service and under what kinds of conditions and expectations. It becomes a tool of governmentality as to how one is governed and who governs.
In contemporary societies, the oscillation between affect and effect highlights equity, agency and upliftment concerns. Global and local conditions may inform who benefits, thereby underscoring the transactionalised nature of service in everyday life, blurring the line between humanitarian service and public service. Against this backdrop, it becomes imperative to reconsider the ways in which service might be reimagined or reclaimed.
One fertile site for such inquiry is the arts. In the twentieth century, arts institutions and practitioners increasingly articulated their work in terms of service to communities, whether through participatory theatre, public art commissions, community music projects, or socially engaged design. This turn recognised the arts as both objects of aesthetic appreciation and as agents of social cohesion, critical reflection, and collective empowerment.
But there is a tension. While artistic practices can amplify and provide space for marginalised voices, foster intercultural dialogue, and catalyse civic participation, their aesthetic and creative dimensions can also be instrumentalised for urban redevelopment and gentrification agendas, tourism strategies, corporate sponsorships, or assuaging political tensions.
This ISSUE presents ways in which artists, writers, and scholars reimagine and broaden the idea of service. Ultimately, the aim is not to resolve the inherent ambivalence of service but to illuminate it.
